Chinese President Xi Jinping has been compared with Chairman Mao and Deng Xiaoping as one of the great leaders in the People’s Republic of China. He fully deserves such accolades. What is said about him in the western mainstream media is irrelevant and meaningless from a Chinese perspective (what do you expect from adversarial sources in today’s west? Use their low-browed treatment of Trump for reference).

Here is a list of 10 major achievements under Xi’s rule in the last 12 years -

1. anti-corruption

   1. when Xi took the helm in 2013, the country suffered from a deep-rooted severe corruption problem at all levels. Corruption was named as the single most critical issue facing the country. Most citizens were deeply frustrated and lost much faith in the government and the party. Many left the country including this author.

   2. Xi has run the longest anti-corruption campaign in Chinese history (ongoing to this day). In his first 5 years, over 1 million officials from national to local government, state-owned companies, banks, and military were prosecuted and punished. This included over 300 vice minister level and above officials out of roughly 2000 in total: 1 member of the Poliburo Standing committee (same offical rank as Xi), 2 vice chairmen of the Central Military Commission (the most senior military posts after Xi himself as commander in chief), 7 cabinet ministers (including the Railway Minister who was sentenced to death).

   3. More vice-minister and above level officials were removed and prosecuted in the 5 years than the previous 60 combined.

   4. the anti-corruption drive continues to this day. In the last 12 months, the foreign minister, 2 defence ministers (the incumbent and his predecessor), 9 generals in the PLA Rocket Force, numerous SOE CEOs, senior bankers, hospital administrators, etc. have been removed for corruption.

   5. for the average citizen, the issue has changed from their biggest concern to the one with highest satisfaction over government work in the last decade

2. poverty reduction and common prosperity

   1. while economic growth was rapid in the 2000s and 2010s, income disparity and wealth gap were out of hand. This was leading to popular resentment not unlike what is happening in the US today.

   2. Xi announced a nation wide drive for Common Prosperity and poverty reduction initiative. 3 million grassroot officials were dispatched to rural areas to live and work on site for “targeted poverty allevation” in the countryside from 1 to 3 years. 1 trillion RMB ($150 billion) was invested. As a result, over 100 million people were brought out of extreme poverty.

   3. at the same time, the party has also built a base of millions of grassroot officials who have now had first hand experience in rural management and represented a potential future pool for merit-based promotions in the government apparatus. A dual purpose was achieved.

   4. meanwhile, the government has enforced pay reduction in various bureaucracies and the financial service industry in particular. China is probably the only country in the world where bankers are being paid less today than 5 years ago. A side benefit is to reduce the attractiveness of financial industry compared with other productive sectors of the economy. After all, actual engineers are far more important for the society and economy than “financial” engineers.

3. BRI - the belt and road initiave

   1. $2 trillion has been invested in infrastructure projects, commodity production, and global trade projects across the world. 149 countries have now officially signed up to this China-led global economic project. The most recent example is the opening of the $1.5 billion Porto Chancay container port in Peru which will turbocharge Peru’s trade growth and China’s access to South American raw materials, agricultural produce and markets.

   2. the numerous roads, bridges, ports, railroads, tunnels, hospitals will benefit the majority of the world’s developing countries for decades to come.

   3. meanwhile, China has made better use of its vast production capacity and diversified its trade relationship away from the collective west which is pursuing an adversarial confrontation with it. This reduced dependency on trade with hostile powers enables China to deal with the coming decoupling more effectively.

   4. as a side note, who today remember the so-called “build back better - world” - a program announced with big fanfare by the US and its European vassals when Biden was elected, which allegedly would invest trillions of dollars in the developing world as competition to China. I bet you need to wreck your brain to come up with one decent project that has been delivered.

4. Made in China 2025

   1. in 2015, Xi announced China is planning to move up the global supply chain from low end manufacturing to high end high value-add manufacturing in a host of industries from telecom to automotive to aerospace to pharmaceutical to machinery to capital goods and green tech

   2. to this end, China has accelerated its investment in science and technology and basic R&D and achieved impressive progress (I’ll touch on that next).

   3. China has now achieved over 90% of its stated goals in the 2015 blueprint - ahead of schedule. China leads the world by a wide margin today in electric vehicles, solar/wind/renewable energy, commerical drones and battery technologies, all critical sectors for the future.

   4. this move has positioned China in a leading competitive position globally for the forthcoming 4th Industrial Resolution

5. prioritize science and technology

   1. Xi has heavily focused Chinese investment and national resources on the development of science and technology since he took the rein

   2. according to ASPI, an australian think tank that publishes the critical future technology tracker, China leads in 57 out of 64 fields that have been identified as critical technologies for the future ranging from material science to aeronautics to quantum computing to next-gen telecom to semiconductors to robotics to life science and space technology. In multiple fields, China’s lead is so vast that it poses a “monopoly” risk according to ASPI, a very anti-China entity funded partially by US state department.

   3. China Academy of Sciences is the undisputable global leader in science and technology R&D in numerous fields of research. Numerous Chinese universities and research institutes now are at the cutting edge of R&D as well as commericalization of new technologies.

   4. this increased science and technology capacity has enabled Chinese military modernization which is another key achievement under Xi which I’ll touch on later.

6. pollution and safety

   1. when Xi took over, China was suffering the worst pollution problem in the world as a consequence of break-neck industrialization and urbanization in the past 3 decades. Beijing was infamous for its smog and terrible PSI readings. The US embassy cynically started to publish daily PSI readings in Beijing in 2008 in a pretense of public safety promotion around Beijing Olympics. However, since Beijing’s air pollution has improved so much in the past few years, the US embassy now has stopped publishing PSI out of fear of showing Chinese improvement. How shameless.

   2. Xi undertook one of the most aggressive green drive in world’s history with massive investment into green tech, reforestation, relocation and closure of polluting industries, water and soil improvement, reclaimation of arid land, and land use reform.

   3. China today plants more trees in a year than the rest of the world combined. China has built a 3500 kilometer green belt around the world second largest shifting sand desert the Taklamakan Desert. Similarly annual sales of electric vehicles in China exceeds 50% global sales. China leads the world in the installation of solar, wind, hydro and nuclear power every single year of the past decade.

   4. Beijing and other major Chinese cities have now improved air and water quality to such an extent that they are rated as having some of the lowest PSI levels in Asia. Beijing reported only 8 days of heavy air pollution in 2023 and 6 of them were due to sand storms from the deserts to its northwest. As a country with more manufacturing production (36% global total) than the next 10 countries combined, this is a phenomenal achievement. Especially when you compare this with the airpocalypse happening in India right now.

   5. China is one of the safest countries in the world with exceptionally low crime rate, drug use or homelessness.

7. military reform

   1. when Xi stepped into his role as the commander in chief, the Chinese military had suffered 4 decades of intentional underinvestment and institutionalized corruption. The military was inefficient, bureaucratic, corrupt and poorly equipped with very low combat readiness.

   2. Xi launched the most aggressive military cleanup and reform in PLA history. 2 vice chairmen of the Central Military Commission were arrested for corruption in his first years. 2 defense ministers were arrested in the last 12 months for corruption and violation of party disciplines. Hundreds of generals have been removed including wholesale cleanup in departments from military procurement to the rocket force.

   3. Xi streamlined and reorganized the military to improve efficiency, increase multi-domain war fighting coordination, prioritize training and combat readiness. And he reduced the size of the military by 300,000, mostly non-combat personnel.

   4. huge investment has been made in new weapon system development from aircraft carriers to hypersonic missiles to stealth fighters to air defense weapons to unmanned aerial and maritime system to directed energy weapons and nuclear modernization.

   5. today China leads in multiple fields in the battlefields of tomorrow such as hypersonic and unmanned systems. One example is China now has so many hypersonic missile attack systems against US aircraft carrier groups (the main power projection tool in its arsenal) that one loses count of all the models: DF17, DF21, DF26, DF27, CJ100, YJ21, etc. Practically all of them are deployed as carrier killers and possess hypersonic features and capabilities such as hypersonic glide vehicles (HGV) and fractional orbital bombardment (FOB) capabilities. Anti-access area denial (A2AD) is a reality in China’s near shores.

   6. the US military will face an enemy it has never faced before - peer level technology plus vastly superior production and cost advantages. This is an area where the so-called “China price” plus “overcapacity “ (as the west likes to complain) will have deadly consequences.

   7. there is no question that the US will lose to China, probably dramatically, in a kinetic war near Chinese shores and suffer a humiliating defeat as never before in its short history. Furthermore, the US mainland won’t be safe from retaliatory attacks - a key reason behind its historical offshore militarism, bravado and sense of immunity. The myth of US exceptionalism will be irreversiblly broken.

8. crackdown on tech monopolies

   1. most western media promoted the false idea that China’s crackdown on tech companies like Alibaba or Tencent was bad for business and was designed to hurt private firms. Nothing is further from the truth.

   2. the reality is that consumer tech companies in China are becoming rent-seeking monopolies just like their counterparts in the US. Such concentration of market power as well as financial capital and tech talents are bad for consumers and the development of new innovative businesses.

   3. by limiting the unregulated growth of tech monopolies into areas like consumer finance (e.g. Alipay), China preemptively addresses the risks associated with unbridled capitalism at the expense of consumers and competitors. The west is facing the same challenge with its tech giants like Google and Facebook. However it lacks the political will and suffers from regulatory capture by these deep-pocketed private firms who can deploy numerous lobbyists and lawyers to maintain and extend their monopolies.

   4. China also is redirecting capital and talents to higher-priority tech initiatives by limiting these consumer-tech businesses which only marginally improve the country’s high tech competitiveness. Deep hard tech such as semiconductor, industrial AI, and unmanned technology is direct beneficiary of such policy shifts.

9. burst the housing bubble

   1. Xi inherited a lop-sided economy when he took office in 2013 - property industry accounted for a quarter of China’s GDP, housing prices became rampantly speculative and way beyond the purchasing power of average citizen, and a widening wealth gap was exasperated.

   2. property industry absorbed the majority of banking loans and people’savings with tremendous hidden risks as developers got over-leveraged. Corruption and social issues related to land sales and evictions were causes for deep concerns across the country. China was poised for a repeat of the worst type of housing bubble collapse at even greater magnitude than the 2008 US subprime crisis which was billed as the worst recession since the great depression of the 1930s.

   3. Xi strongly advocated the concept of “houses are for people to live in, not for speculation” and engineered a landing of the housing market over the course of the last 5 years. While the bubble burst was painful and slowed economic growth markedly, it was hardly a crush and didn’t cause a systemic breakdown. Many developers failed but there is no banking crisis as happened in the US and there is no mass mortgage defaults and foreclosures like in the US.

   4. with the burst of the property bubble, housing becomes more affordable and household debts are reduced. The bane of property-ownership based wealth disparity is mitigated. More importantly, capital allocation becomes more rational and can be directed to more productive areas such as high tech manufacturing.

10. cultural and civilizational revival

    1. during the 3 decades since China’s opening up and reform, huge societal changes took place, not all to the healthy development of the country. Many Chinese lost touch with their own long time tradition and culture. Many started to suffer from western type consumerism and hedonism. Family values declined. Consumers favor western brands for vanity and flaunting. Western nihilist liberalism took root among many so-called intellectuals. Many became openly subservient to western values and interests. Some started to advocate them blindly without understanding their particular cultural roots or compitability with local Chinese reality or even their failings in the west’s own society (like with LGBTQ, the trans movement and wokeism).

    2. as the west led by the US started to confront China’s rise, these societal changes, if unchecked, represented a significant internal weakness that could be exploited to damage China’s interest and advance our adversaries’. The riots in Hong Kong was a case in point. The west desperately wanted to exploit any internal weaknesses and polarization to promote color revolution and regime sabotage as part of their long-practiced playbook.

    3. Xi and his team anticipated the risks and started to undertake a cultural and civilizational revival with a focus to promote traditional values and Chinese culture. His advocacy of Global Civilization Initiative takes this drive to the world. This is a great pushback against western hegemonic universalism and a celebration of civilizational diversity and uniqueness. Interestingly, Russian President Putin is pursuing a similar effort to emphasize the Russian civilizational distinctiveness and call for a return to indigenous cultural and religious traditions.

    4. much progress has been made in the past decade or so - Chinese consumers today are increasingly buying Chinese brands from sporting goods to FMCG to cars. Local fast foods and local coffee brands are now favored over western ones. The Chinese now prefer domestic destinations in leisure travel. Of course, it is helped with the ease and low cost of high speed rails and other infrastructures crisscrossing the country.

    5. there is also a marked burst of growth of Chinese cultural products such as contemporary and period dramas, domestic films, traditional literature, Chinese-themed video games such as Black Myth Wukong, etc. The days of Hollywood blockbusters ruling Chinese box offices are gone and unlikely to ever come back. Meanwhile, Chinese social media such as TikTok are gaining a global presence.

    6. similarly, a revival is quietly happening with traditional Chinese philosophies and ideals such as Confusianism and Taoism.

    7. the growth of Chinese soft power is laying the foundation for the rebirth of China’s global preeminence it enjoyed as a leading civilization for four thousand years in the past.

As Xi started on his third term as head of state, we expect China to go from strength to strength. In the not too distant future, we can fully expect his crowning achievement - the reunification of Taiwan back to the motherland and the vanquishing of the last vestige of China’s “century of humiliation”. This is the final chapter of the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation and people. Xi will earn his place in the Chinese history as yet another great transformative leader.